Tag: wordpress

Why you should blog, be it 2006 or 2026 or 2046

First up, what is a blog? According to Wikipedia, “A blog (a truncation of “weblog”) is a website whose basic unit is a “post” or “entry”, with posts typically presented in reverse chronological order.” So, a website made up of posts.

Now if you share anything on social media — and you likely do — you are already posting information in reverse chronological order already. Why not blog too? Blogging is just a different form of what you are already doing.

So why should you blog over posting on Instagram or Bluesky or some other places? Well, I have several reasons:

  1. If you contribute to Instagram or Threads or Bluesky (or god forbid, X) on a regular basis, then you should consider blogging. All those posts will be more or less lost: your blog posts won’t.
  2. If you discover new ways to do things, blogging is a way for other people to find it.
  3. If you want to demonstrate your expertise, a blog is a way to do that.
  4. If you want to keep a record of parts of your life, blogging is a good way to record it.
  5. If you find good things on the web and you want to comment on them, write that comment up in a blog post.
  6. If you find yourself sharing the same information with others regularly, write that information on your blog and then point people to it. This is one of my favourite reasons to blog.
  7. If you want to improve your writing, blogging regularly can help with that.
  8. If you want to know what you think and improve your thinking, blogging can help with that too.
  9. If you want to remember what you thought or how you felt 1, 2 or even 10 years ago, your blog posts can remind you.
  10. If you want to create something, a blog is something! 🙂

Now you don’t need a blog to do all these things. You can simply have a website, or a private journal, or any number of recording devices. But a blog is a good way to do these things.

Some people will say you can still make money blogging in 2026. I dunno. Maybe if you have a large following already, then blogging or newslettering can help you make money. I personally don’t blog for anything other than the 10 reasons listed above.

Do you have to blog every day or every week or what have you? No. You can blog one post and be done! Or you can blog incessantly like Paul Krugman on Substack! It’s up to you. It’s your life and your blog. You can even end it after a month, or a year. It’s all your choice.

As to what to use to host your blog, it depends on how technical you want to be. I have quite a few blogs and websites, some more active than others. Some on Blogger.com, some on Tumblr.com, but mainly I put my blogs on WordPress.com and if I had to recommend one place to put them, I’d go with that.

If you want to start a blog on WordPress, then you can ask DuckDuckGo and it will tell you something like this:

“To create a blog in WordPress, sign up for a free account on WordPress.com, choose a theme, and start writing your posts. You can customize your blog’s appearance and manage it easily without any coding skills.

The Steps to Start a Blog on WordPress. (Steps 1 to 3 are all you really need, though it will help if you do everything on the list below. – blm)

  • Step 1: Sign Up for an Account
    • Visit WordPress.com and click on Get Started.
    • Create a free account by providing your email address and choosing a password.
    • Select a domain name for your blog. You can use a free WordPress subdomain or register a custom domain.
  • Step 2: Choose a Theme
      • After signing up, browse through various themes available on WordPress.
      • Pick a theme that suits your blog’s style and purpose. You can customize it later.
      • (The theme for this blog is https://wordpress.com/theme/colinear – blm)
  • Step 3: Write Your First Post
    • Go to your dashboard and click on Posts.
    • Select Add New Post to start writing. Introduce yourself and explain what your blog will cover. (Or just write what ever is on your mind. Remember, it’s your blog. -blm)
  • Step 4: Customize Your Blog
    • Adjust your blog’s appearance by going to the Appearance section.
    • You can modify colors, fonts, and layouts to make your blog unique.
  • Step 5: Create Essential Pages
    • Add important pages like About, Contact, and Home.
    • Use the Navigation Menu to help visitors find these pages easily.
  • Step 6: Publish and Promote
    • Once your first post is ready, hit Publish.
    • Share your blog on social media and invite friends and family to follow it.
  • Additional Tips
    • Consider using plugins to enhance functionality, such as SEO tools or social media sharing options.
    • Regularly update your blog with new content to engage your audience and grow your readership.
    • By following these steps, you can successfully start and manage your blog on WordPress without needing any coding skills.”

Now you have your blog. Congrats! So what’s next? Obviously you need to post.

One way I encourage people to come up with new blog posts is to do these things:

  • Go over what you’ve posted on other social media. Those posts can be extended to make a good blog post. When I sit down every Saturday morning to write, I look at what I posted on Bluesky. You might do the same thing if you use Threads or Instagram or even Teams or Slack.
  • What did you share with others via email last week? Sometimes I go through my email, find something, and copy and edit it into a blog post. (Being respectful of others people’s privacy, of course.)
  • What did you learn this week? It could be a new way to get to work, an easier way to cook a meal, a better way to use a particular technology….you name it, it could be a good blog post. Remember: it doesn’t have to be the best way of doing it. It doesn’t even have to be the first time someone learned how to do it. It just has to be something you learned that you think other people might benefit from knowing too. (I wrote this piece on how to better use the NYTimes app and it’s now my #1 post. You never know what information people need. Type in “nytimes app fix” in your search engine: you might see it.)
  • What did you think was good this week? Take a photo and post it. Or simply write about it. (You can write about what you thought was bad about something too, but in my experience focusing on writing about good things is a better approach.)
  • What was something you know now that you wish you knew 1, 2, 10, 20 years ago that you know now? Write about that. Someone 10 or 20 years younger than you will be looking for that information.
  • Write about something you know very well that you wish others knew about. Be very specific. Provide lots of detail. There are lots of things written about the Chrysler building, but this post I wrote gets lots of attention: On appreciating the Chrysler Building (my favorite building in the world). Can I say why? Nope. I can say this though: people often will type in different combination of strings, looking for just the post or page that contains what they are looking for. By being specific and detailed in your post, there’s a better chance they will find it.

Don’t worry if you write something and a week or so later you read it online and think: oh that could be better. Go onto your site and edit it! Blogging isn’t permanent like a book…you can change things or even delete them if you think you are wrong.

Don’t worry if no one will read it. You read it! You can send it to people you know and they will read it. If you’re lucky, people you don’t know will also read it. And if not, that’s fine.

Can you use A.I. to write your blog? You can, but I don’t recommend it. A blog will be better because it came from you, regardless of how well (or not well) you write. Take the opportunity to improve your communications skills as you blog. That alone is a good reason to write it.

Good luck with your blog! Post a link to it in the comments.

Some reflections on reaching one million views on my blog today

I started this blog on April 2007. After four years, it had reached 500,000 views. A decade later, it has reached a new milestone: a million views!

In the first four years, blogging was hot. I even had my blog featured on one of the blog roles on the New York Times. (It was a fluke, but it meant I got 500 views a day: now I average around 50 views.) In the last decade, blogging has been superseded many times by other online media, from twitter to TikToks. I use some of them, but I keep beavering away here too.

I have been steadily blogging for ten years, never knowing if I would reach this peak. Now that I have, I don’t know what I will do. Will I still blog every weekend and have them distributed throughout the week? Or will I just go with a random schedule? Will I move this off of WordPress and go to another platform and more effectively monetize the few popular posts I have? I don’t know. Something will change.

Meanwhile, I expect I will continue to blog. I like it. Maybe my next goal is 5000 posts. Or 250,000 visitors. We will see!

As always, thanks for reading this. I’ve been lucky to have thousands of people like you reading my posts a million times. That’s great, and greatly appreciated.

P.S. I’ve written a fair bit of blog posts about blogging. You can read them, here.

P.S.S. My favorites are here.

 

 

How I blog now (for people interested in comparing notes on blogging)

Blogging is dead (so it is said). But I am still blogging, and happily so. Here’s why, here’s what I think has changed, and here’s what I do now.

I have been blogging a long time (since 2005). Over that time I have had blogs on Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr, and on IBM’s hosted sites. I still blog on WordPress and IBM. (Posterous is gone, Tumblr feels less like blogging and more like social media sharing (great stuff, but not for me), and Blogger never could top WordPress for me.)

Blogging had it’s big moment in the early Web 2.0 days, and a number of bloggers went on to great success. Then more and different types of social media appeared, making blogging seemed dated and bloated. Even I dropped off blogging and started doing more with Twitter, Instagram, and more.

I have returned to blogging because it still has something that other social media lacks. It allows me to capture longer ideas, unlike other social media. It lets me go back and see what I was thinking about and doing years ago. Most social media is about the Now and about the Group, but blogging is more than that. Blogging extends in time, and starts (but doesn’t end) with me.

I was also incented by a number of small things. One, my blog traffic was declining, and I thought I would like to see if I could reverse it. I like the idea of people reading my blog, and I thought blogging again could improve the decline. Two, WordPress started paying me monthly for my blog traffic. It is a pittance: less than $6 a month. I have a goal to get it up higher than that. Three, I’d like to reach the goal of having a million views of my blog. I started the blog modestly, and I have been happy to see how it has grown. I’d like to hit that number.

Those are small incentives, though. A bigger incentive/goal is that writing my blog is Writing. Blogging is a good word, but what I really want to do is write and write better and eventually write well. Maintaining the blog helps with that goal.

(If your blog is mainly writing, consider saying you are Writing (not Blogging) when you are adding to your blog. A blog is a web log, but if you are trying to do something more than just log things — and you likely are — why not elevate what you are doing by labelling it with a better label?)

How I blog now:

  1. I use a WordPress plugin with my Chrome browser. That allows me to quickly blog about an interesting web page I come across.
  2. If I don’t want to blog about it now, I use instapaper to save interesting pages for later. Then I will take time and go though the saved pages and either blog about them or save them in delicious (or just get rid of them).
  3. To promote my blog posts, I connect twitter to my WordPress blog: whenever I update my blog, I have a link to it posted on twitter.(After all, I want people to read them, and flagging them on twitter is one way to do that).
  4. If I post a number of posts at the same time, I schedule when they are posted. Otherwise, people on twitter will get flooded with them, and I think that doesn’t help get people to read them (and it is likely annoying).
  5. Besides my web browser, I use Feedly to read other blogs. I have integrated Feedly with my WordPress blog using IFTTT. I have an IFTTT recipe that fires off whenever I save a document in Feedly. The recipe will create a new draft in WordPress for me to work on later.
  6. I process the drafts in WordPress using Firefox and a plugin called ScribeFire. ScribeFire used to work with WordPress, but it doesn’t work for mine now. But I still use it to create more complex blog posts (like this one). Then I go to the admin panel of WordPress and update my blog using copy and paste. (I know, this isn’t exactly *easy*, but I had gotten used to ScribeFire and I haven’t found a tool that I like as much as that.)

Unlike many smart bloggers I follow, I tend not to write long form posts. When I do, I write them in Microsoft Word, mainly because if my machine hangs up or reboots or does any number of stupid things, I will not lose what I have written thanks to Word’s superb autosave feature. Once it is good enough (by my meagre standards), I will copy and paste it into WordPress.